At U.N, Bahari and CPJ urge global attention

Newsweek journalist
Maziar Bahari helped us launch Attacks on the Press at the United
Nations in New York
today. Bahari,
an Iranian-Canadian citizen, was labeled an enemy of the Iranian regime and cruelly
imprisoned for 118 days last year in Tehran.
His very presence today, CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney noted, was testament
to the “tremendous efforts of press freedom groups around the world" that have advocated for the release of jailed journalists. But with
at least 47
journalists in jail in Iran as of February 1, according to
CPJ research, it’s still a “pretty grim picture,” Mahoney said.

As part of CPJ’s efforts to engage the global community in
protecting journalists and their right to report, Mahoney called on U.N. Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon to make freedom of expression a top, ongoing U.N. priority.

Bahari, who was held in solitary confinement for much of his
imprisonment, credits international pressure in part for his freedom. “I think,
as in my case, patience and piling on pressure through publicity eventually
should have results,” he said. Asking the secretary-general to prioritize press
freedom will have a ripple effect, he said, and “that ripple effect helped free
me.”

Speaking alongside Mahoney and Bahari, CPJ Asia Program Coordinator
Bob Dietz stressed the need to keep press freedom abuses high on the
international human rights agenda. In Attacks
on the Press, Dietz wrote about the escalating dangers to reporters working
in conflict zones in Afghanistan
and Pakistan.

When asked by a reporter for the Canadian broadcaster CBC
whether it is too dangerous now for foreign news outlets to send reporters
into war zones, Dietz said the alternative is “much, much worse”—creating a vacuum in which not enough people will be on
the ground to bear witness and report what they see to the world.

Lauren Wolfe is the director of Women Under Siege, a project on sexualized violence and conflict at the Women's Media Center. While CPJ's senior editor, she wrote the CPJ report, "The Silencing Crime: Sexual Violence and Journalists." Previously, she was a researcher on two New York Times books on the 9/11 attacks.